Peripheral Reading

In response to That’s The Book For Me:

Samuel, either this piece is brilliant and hilarious, or frightfully missing the point, that is, the perspective of these stories and events from an Eternal perspective.
Reading along I felt as though I were looking through a microscope at a sampling of topsoil: bugs, microbes, beasties and vermits; vomitus, deification, death, decay, ... While to the gardener, it is no less than gold.

                The Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron: ‘For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God.  No man who has any defect may come near:  no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed;  no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is hunchbacked or dwarfed, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles.  No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the offerings made to the Lord by fire.  He has a defect; he must not come near to offer the food of his God.  He may eat the most holy food of his God, as well as the holy food; yet because of his defect, he must not go near the curtain or approach the altar, and so desecrate my sanctuary.  I am the Lord, who makes them holy.’”

                                                                                                          Leviticus 21:16-23

                “I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the from the Law until everything is accomplished.”

                                                                                                          Matthew 5:18

A Compromise

                The men of principled simplicity

                Will have no traffic with our subtle doubt.

                The world is flat, they tell us, and they shout:

                The myth of depth is an absurdity!

                For if there were additional dimensions

                Beside the good old pair we’ll always cherish,

                How could a man live safely without tensions?

                How could he live and not expect to perish?

                In order peacefully to coexist

                Let us strike one dimension off our list.

                If they are right, those men of principle,

                And life in depth is so inimical,

                The third dimension is dispensable.

                                                                                         H. Hesse

The difference for me is that as a gardener, I’ve come to appreciate and even enjoy seeing all the ‘gross’ parts, like the “bugs, microbes, beasties and vermits”; even the decomposing shit, which on my farm I will even sometimes pick apart to see how many dung beetles have been visiting.  The more I focus in on the details in Scripture, and particularly the Old Testament, the less I like it.  I have to really draw back, look with my periphery, and I mean way back before I start seeing any sort of pattern that I can be comfortable with.  (Not sure what an Eternal perspective is or even if we could truly understand such a perspective, but maybe drawing back and trying to see some sort of pattern is what you mean?)  However, more important than my own aversions, was to address the disingenuous idea that we need to use Scripture to raise our kids or give our nation a moral compass.  This is to view the Bible in a linear fashion, much like a handbook or a mathematical equation.  Naturally, the 10 commandments are the first thing a linear thinking moralist will be drawn to.  But to appeal to the OT’s linear, didactic, one-to-one elements is simply ridiculous.  Sure, take the 10 commandments, but then you’ve got to throw oodles of other stuff away.  And I’m not just talking about throwing away dietary laws like the ban on pork or snakes or eating blood or fat.  You could throw away all the laws on sacrifices as well and there are still oodles of moral laws that I don’t think anyone in their right mind would be comfortable with.  You might start off on familiar ground where there are prohibitions against stealing, lying, denying workers wages, cursing God etc…  Then of course, there are the plethora of prohibitions against having sex with family members and other peoples wives and animals; only don’t forget that the penalty is death.  Soon, however, you find yourself on more shaky ground with other prohibitions against homosexuality, intercourse with a menstruating woman, cursing your parents, planting fields with two different kinds of seed, mating different breeds of animals, wearing clothing of two different materials, certain kinds of haircuts, or even tattoos.  Or how about if a man thinks his wife has been cheating on him, shall we use the OT method to establish guilt?  A classic trial by ordeal, the husband brings his accused wife in to the tabernacle or temple.  She stands before the altar.  The priest takes holy water and scoops up dirt from the tabernacle floor (I imagine it’s full of every conceivable animal part that has been tracked around by the gazillions of sacrifices going on.)  She drinks the “bitter water”.  If she’s innocent, the Lord will protect her.  If not, her belly will swell, and her “thigh waste away”, probably to mean she will be rendered barren.  (If she was pregnant from her illicit lover, this would indeed be an abortion.)  I think it’s also significant, that even if she is proved innocent, the husband suffers no consequences for putting her through such an ordeal.  I certainly don’t care to have my children’s or nation’s morality dictated by such scripture.

So what’s my point in delving into the nastier parts of the OT?  In the simplest of terms, I am saying that the pattern or gestalt of the Old Testament is not worth emulating.  Maybe in historical context we can see that relative to the child sacrifice going on around them, the move to animal sacrifice was indeed a move in the right direction.  I think Nate can speak much more eloquently to issue of sacrifice and what it means for us today.  What is worth observing is what rose out of this system.  It is despite the nasty feel of the OT where anyone who has a defect or is impure is cut off, that something else pushed through.  In some ways it can be encouraging that even with the haughty, ethnocentric, misogynist, purity-infatuated, us-them system of the OT Jews, someone could come out of it saying, “Hey Israel!  Despite the fact that God commanded you to make sacrifices for just about every aspect of life, that’s not really what God is interested in.  God wants you to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.”  We, outside of the old Judaic system, can see and recognize these embryonic attempts to rise above the existing system.  We recognize them, and rightly pick them out and quote them.  But we shouldn’t forget that these are the exceptions, being pulled out of hundreds and hundreds of pages of some pretty darn depressing and oppressing stuff.  In other words, Christians’ worship of Scripture, and the ensuing attempt to base our country’s or our children’s morality on what is found in scripture, is much like trying to shove a three dimensional object back into a two dimensional box.  I might even go as far as to say it renders Christ’s life and death as meaningless.  And I’m not just talking about the OT.  Christians want to look at the NT in the same way.  Despite the fact that the NT seems to try and leave the Law behind and makes its heroic though feeble attempts to build on Christ’s boundary breaking message, many Christians still want to hold on to the Bible like a handbook, and cling to Paul’s rules for elders or who to judge or whatever.  It’s like they are addicted to the OT drug of the law, rather than seeing that this was a time of exploding inclusion.  It was indeed radical for Gentiles to be allowed in the fold without having to chop the tidbits off the end of their penises. Today that sounds silly.  Back then it was radical.  Despite how annoying Paul may come across today, despite, say, how obvious it is that Mathew is stretching things totally out of context to try and portray Christ as the fulfillment of Jewish scripture, or even despite the manipulative and threatening tone that is so often used by the authors as they are trying to structure and control a new movement quickly developing into a multinational phenomenon; despite all that, you still get the sense that these guys had felt something meaningful and freeing.  Something they were willing to devote their lives to.

If Christians weren’t in the habit of making scripture an idol, they would understand, like C.S. Lewis, that scripture is an earthen vessel like all other human works where the dynamic and beauty are not found in the music, or experience, or writing, but comes through all of these human creations.  Only if we have a realistic view of scripture, with all of its many faults along with its good things, will we get any kind of true gestalt of it all and be able to see the interplay of the dynamic and static within the cultural context.  (Isn’t this true with anything?)  To pretend that truth is objective and that scripture is simply a handbook that orders the proper moral equations, in the end is an insult to scripture.  We aren’t allowing it to be an expression of what it really is; an ancient recording of a religion and morality that not only was long-lasting, but evolved and grew.  Of course, I am up against the Chestertonian madness where one cannot argue the other out of their point of view.  I could dredge up a hundred examples both in the Old and New Testament that are in direct contradiction of what we believe today, but that won’t get through.  The madness of rationality finds an explanation, regardless of how narrow, and sticks to its guns.  The rational explanation, as Chesterton says, accounts for all the facts.  Like for instance the idea that God put old looking fossils in the ground to test our faith.  If you accept it as true, it accounts for everything.  Any contradiction is conveniently slipped into the ‘testing’ box—nice and tidy.  Chesterton writes, “The lunatics theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.  I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.”  Scripture as inerrant or infallible or God-inspired has that (if I may quote Chesterton out of context!) “unmistakable mark of madness…this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.”  Sadly, my family gave me and still gives me an explanation that almost sounds like sanity.  If we just see the Bible as a whole, and read each verse in context, you will see that it does not contradict itself and says exactly such and such and such.  To those not intimately familiar with scripture, this sounds very wise.  Unfortunately for my family, I had taken their advice and read the Bible very thoroughly and repeatedly.  It turned out that this “Bible as a whole” was a very vague sort of story line of Christ taking the place of sacrificial lambs, covenants established by God and a set of rules that was chosen willy-nilly from a plethora of options.  But vague only in its relation to scripture.  This story has been told over and over again, written about thousands upon thousands of times, hammered out until a very clear thread is revealed that goes from God to Adam to Noah to Moses to Christ to the Apostles to the Early Church to the Catholics to the Protestants to the pastors of the day.  It’s so crystal clear that people have forgotten to check whether it is remotely even related to scripture anymore.  I swear I read a completely different Bible than my family.  But up against the madness, you point to things like the wife’s trial by ordeal at the altar and, with the most perfunctory ease, this most unjust injustice, which would be vehemently descried in any other context religious or not, is merely slipped into the ‘God-needed-to-establish-the-importance-of-the-instution-of-marriage’ box; or perhaps the “God-shows-how-important-fidelity-is’ box.  You mention how it sure is unsettling to read that God considered any sort of physical blemish as a desecration to his holy place and you’ll find yourself staring into the “Never-forget-God-is-Holy" box.  Doesn’t matter that this sentiment is directly contradictory to the life lived by Christ, because if all else fails, there is the “God's-ways-are-above-our-ways-we-just-need-to-have-faith” box—actually that’s just the ‘testing’ box all over again.  I feel my ribcage contracting just thinking about it. 

I know for many this was never much of an issue.  However, when I was younger I remember my epic struggle with “Scripture’s Authority”.  Couple the reverence I was told to have of the Bible with stakes that were eternal—either eternal bliss or eternal torment—and you can see how I felt suffocated and yet was too scared to step out of the sacred circle.  All the while, I was enjoying parts of the Bible and didn’t want to discredit the good with the bad.  Finally letting go of such a two-dimensional view of scripture allowed both myself and the Bible to breathe.  My desire for health eventually won over my loyalty to truth and not only did I regain some sanity, but what the Bible actually had to offer became that much clearer.